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How a phrase coined during the Depression became a national creed, a global brand, and a vessel for disillusionment.
By Hua Hsu
James Truslow Adams was born in Brooklyn in 1878, the son of a struggling Wall Street broker who had himself been born in Caracas, Venezuela. Adams grew up with a sense of fallen expectations and diminished fortunes: his family history was filled with high-living bankers and merchants engaged in international ventures, but by the time he was a child that prosperity had ebbed away. His early career was respectable; he learned bookkeeping and typing, eventually joining a brokerage house. Then, at thirty-five, he left Wall Street to pursue his true passion: history. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in 1922, for “The Founding of New England,” the first book in his three-volume account of the region. In 1931, he published “The Epic of America,” a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that was translated into a dozen languages, sold half a million copies, and injected a potent new formula into the culture.
Adams was not the first to suggest that Americans held an optimistic faith in tomorrow, but, in “The Epic of America,” he did come up with the catchiest way of describing it: “that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” This was not a dream of “motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” A reviewer counted at least fifty passages in which Adams alluded to the American Dream, a motif that connected the struggles of the present with those of the intrepid settlers, rugged frontiersmen, and self-made successes of the past.
It’s strange to realize that such a term has a history, since faith in upward mobility seems embedded in the American consciousness, like an operating system we notice only when it glitches or needs an update. Yet Adams himself had reason to feel the fragility of that faith, having inherited a story of decline and lived one of reinvention. And his study of America’s historical arc, written in the early years of the Great Depression, clearly had a restorative aim. He was naming the dream to point out its precarious state and its need for fortification. He believed that “the great business leaders are likely to lead us astray rather than to guide us,” and that America had lost sight of the communal spirit that once inspired ordinary people to new heights. “Can we hold to the good and escape from the bad?”
In the decades that followed the publication of “The Epic of America,” the American Dream became one of the nation’s great exports, an advertisement for a prosperous, socially mobile way of life unavailable elsewhere. The members of America’s postwar population boom came of age during one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in human history. From 1945 to 1975, the U.S. economy more than doubled, accounting for roughly a third of the world’s industrial output. These gains were shared across socioeconomic strata, as people moved from farms to cities and from cities to suburbs. Working Americans had access to affordable homes, college educations, and jobs that provided a clear path to middle-class stability. People grew accustomed to the expectation that each generation would surpass the horizons of their forebears. According to a 2016 study led by the economist Raj Chetty, Americans born in 1940 had a ninety-two-per-cent chance of earning more than their parents had.
The idea that anyone could bootstrap their way to affluence had profound effects on how people treated one another, something Adams noted in “The Epic of America.” He wrote of a Frenchman visiting New York City who expressed astonishment at “the way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality.” Rich and poor, he thought, shared a kind of dignity.
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